


When The Night is Over

by fadelikesun



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/F, Post Season 3, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 02:20:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20716481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadelikesun/pseuds/fadelikesun
Summary: Some small, nearly conscious part of the jaded FBI agent’s mind already knows that she’s dreaming. Like she’s floating in suspension between fantasy and reality, and she’s fated to either sink or swim. After some months of falling victim to the perils of her own cruel imagination, Dom has developed a warning sign, you see. A telltale trigger.





	When The Night is Over

**Author's Note:**

> — inspired massively, but not based on, Comet (2014) and the whole surreal vibe it has. this is basically somewhat of an ode to messy relationships without labels and how darlene and dom might progress. 
> 
> dedicated to dsac for keeping my domlene pain fresh. ♥
> 
> i'm writing as i go, but with a plan in mind, so. who knows where the fuck we'll end up.

Some small, nearly conscious part of the jaded FBI agent’s mind already knows that she’s dreaming. Like she’s floating in suspension between fantasy and reality, and she’s fated to either sink or swim.

After some months of falling victim to the perils of her own cruel imagination, Dom has developed a warning sign, you see. A telltale trigger.

As she sleeps, fixed rigid on her back at the edge of an old, stiff mattress that often feels far too vast, she tastes pennies. An overpowering, coppery pang coating her teeth and tongue like slick saliva. Biting down with vicious haste on the inner corner of her mouth in unconscious frustration that she’s still warring with ghosts in the night.

_It’s just a dream, _she tries to remind herself.

Darlene’s full lips, stained in her typical nude matte, a colour that seems so casual, are hanging ajar. Mouth parted, an answer beginning to creep out at the edges in the form of— 

_Elation? _ Dom wonders. _ Repulsion? _

The brunette faces her wordlessly, her eyes cast downward as she focuses on something else entirely. Black, inky lashes flutter like a doll’s as Darlene’s willowy fingers pry open a small, velvet box.

_This isn’t real._

Dom knows that she’s dreaming, but she doesn’t want to wake up. 

Not yet. Not when… 

She looks so beautiful. 

Even in spite of her grunge-inspired style and smudged eyeliner, Darlene somehow manages to look _ classic _. Or… timeless, even. A kind of beauty you’d only come across once in a lifetime, Dom figured. If you blinked, then you’d miss her. And oh, how painful it would be to miss her. 

“Dom…” She begins, her flat tone indecipherable, her features unreadable. “Are you kidding me?”

Big, glassy blue eyes stare back at the older of the two, eyes that surely work to conceal an innumerable number of skeletons rattling around in the dark corners of her headspace. Darlene is somewhat of a mystery. A wild card. A player in a game who seems to indulge the unpredictability and chaos over the stability of reaching a final destination.

In that way, this makes sense. _ They _ make sense. 

_Don’t they?_

“Babe,” Darlene’s raspy vocals soften, lulling the redhead into a state of calm. “Did you seriously think I was gonna say no?”

“I set aside my expectations a long time ago.” Even in her dream, Dom’s as open and honest as ever. “Neither one of us has got the best track record with this kind of thing, huh?”

“Maybe not…” Darlene muses, and there’s something sincere in the candid silence that follows. Like, maybe she’s just realising that this in itself is a mistake. That they’re both, as people, catastrophic. Where one brings doom, the other is the gloom that follows. And maybe Darlene has paused because she’s already reconsidering. 

But before Dom can fully commit herself to the self doubt she’s spiralling into, Darlene is squaring in on her, tipping her now-fiancée’s chin downward an inch, so that she can stare right through to her soul. “Or maybe — just _ maybe _— before all of this, neither of us wanted to settle for the wrong person...”

Speechless, the redhead’s lips part and—

Customary to Dom’s abysmal stroke of luck in life, that rancid taste of copper returns with a vengeance.

The hapless FBI agent comes to with a listless sigh, staring emptily at the blankness of her ceiling. The nothingness of the white paint is something that she realises, quite pathetically, resonates with her.

**This **is her reality.

Emptiness, betrayal, and a hollow one-bedroom apartment.

The dreams — nightmares? — have been constant since the barn. Trauma does that, she thinks. The brain tries to ‘fix’ the things a person hasn’t tended to in their daily life. A form of closure.

_Of course _she would dream that she proposed to someone she had never even dated. Someone who quite literally fucked her over two ways ‘til Sunday.

_Someone who would never love you _, she tells herself.

See, Agent Dominique DiPierro is in a committed relationship with her working life, always has been. Even left an ex girlfriend sitting alone in some bougie Brooklyn restaurant with an engagement ring in one hand, and her jagged heart shards in the other.

And yet… Some part of her had always thought, or_ hoped _ , that if she ever met the right woman, it would be through her line of work. It was the only thing that made sense, right? Say, if her life was a movie then, naturally, **The One** would fall into her lap while working a case.

And it _ had _made sense, the more she’d trusted Darlene, and the more the liquor had numbed her rationality. It all made sense until she realised that Darlene wasn’t some blessing in disguise. 

She was karma. 

Darlene Alderson was a big _ fuck you _from the universe because, in all reality, Dom DiPierro had it coming. 


End file.
